The Girl Buried in the Woods

by Robert Ellis

  FIFTY-SIX

  Gambini pulled the trigger.

  The gunshot sounded more like a pop as it blasted through the safety glass and turned the entire windshield into a solid web of shattered glass. The truck pitched to the right, then swerved back and slowed down.

  Matt ducked behind the hood and watched Gambini punch his pistol through the glass, trying to clear it away so that he could see the road again. Because the truck was moving, the sheets of shattered glass were flying back into the cab. Matt could hear Moore screaming in panic while Gambini ordered him to get off his seat and help. When the two men became quiet, Matt looked up and caught Gambini peering at him eerily through an open patch in the glass. The man’s dark eyes twitched, and he flashed a cruel smile. Then the truck began swerving to the left and right, hard zigzags with Gambini trying to shake Matt loose.

  The truck picked up more speed. The road appeared to be littered with potholes, the truck vibrating and bouncing up and down. Everything was shaking and jittering.

  Matt drew his pistol out from his belt holster, approximated Gambini’s position behind the wheel, and pulled the trigger three times. Both Moore and Gambini screamed, the truck veering left and almost crashing off the narrow road. But after hitting a pothole the size of a shallow grave, the front wheels rolled back onto the asphalt again. When Matt leaned forward to check the cab, his eyes widened, and his nerves spiked. He could see Gambini’s pistol poking through the shattered glass in the darkness. The Glock .40 fired two times, then two times more—all four shots at point-blank range. Matt dropped below the hood, trying to twist his body out of the way. But the real tell was the stinging sensation in his upper right arm. The streak of blood staining his shirt.

  He’d been hit.

  He took a moment to collect himself, heaving air in and out of his lungs. He watched the muzzle retreating through the hole in the glass. As he tried to examine the gunshot wound in his arm, the truck made a sudden loud noise and began shaking violently. Matt checked the road ahead. The asphalt appeared to be heavily cratered, the stretch of potholes as endless as a walk on the moon. Jamming the pistol in his holster, he tightened his grip on the hood and tried to hold on. He could see the factory burning at the bottom of the hill now. But even more, as the road curved, he could see that three black Lincoln Continentals had fallen in behind them. Despite the sounds of distant sirens approaching and what looked like an LAPD chopper a mile or so off with its searchlight already fired up and beating against the ground, nothing about the three Lincolns or the hard-looking men driving them felt like law enforcement.

  Everything about everything had turned harsh and grim.

  He heard glass shatter and peered back over the hood. Gambini had cleared the rest of the windshield away and was aiming his pistol ready to fire. Even worse, the LAPD chopper had found them, the searchlight as bright as the sun. Matt realized that he no longer had any place to hide. He could feel his heart beating in his chest. The monsters waking up in his head.

  He needed to do something. And he needed to do it in a hurry.

  He lunged through the open windshield, grabbing Gambini’s right hand and trying to pry his fingers away from the gun. He could hear Gambini grunting and groaning as they wrestled for control of the pistol. After a moment, Moore jumped in, wrapping his arms around Matt’s back and trying to yank him out of the cab onto the hood.

  The .40-caliber pistol fired three times, punching holes into the roof and flooding the interior of the cab with the chopper’s white light. The truck began veering out of control.

  Then two more shots exploded through the cab and Moore screamed. As Matt glanced his way, he found the man glaring at his thigh and what looked like a gunshot that had grazed his leg. Moore seemed to go crazy after that and started hurling punches.

  Matt tried to fend them off, thrusting his knees against the dash and piling onto Gambini—the truck swerving wildly back and forth. He slammed Gambini’s head into the seat, seized the hand gripping the gun, and began smashing it against the dashboard.

  Another loud gunshot rang out, ripping a fourth hole through the ceiling.

  Matt bashed Gambini’s hand down again, breaking off the knobs on the radio. Then again and again and again until Gambini finally lost his grip, flinging the pistol through the air and out the windshield. Matt punched him in the face, but the heroin-dealer-turned-King-of-LA only smiled. When Gambini grabbed him by the neck, Moore started shouting something about how Matt was going to get them all killed and started using his legs to help Gambini push him back onto the hood.

  Gambini tightened his grip on Matt’s throat and dug his nails in. Matt tried to pull his fingers away but started choking. When he finally broke the hold, he was out the windshield clinging to the lip in the hood with his legs dangling in the air again.

  He found the front bumper with his feet, began to hear the sirens getting closer, and turned. Three fire engines were barreling toward them down the narrow road with their lights flashing.

  Gambini laughed like a madman and punched down the accelerator, the truck moving faster and faster over the rough road. Once he upped the speed, he began wrenching the steering wheel back and forth—violent shifts to the left and right all over again.

  The fire engines were racing toward them and obviously not going to stop. Judging by the insane glint in Gambini’s eyes, the “mean Gambini gene” had been cut loose for the night, and Matt knew that the maniac had no plans to stop either.

  He turned and started looking for a place to jump or, even more important, a place to land. To the right a solid wall of rocks and stone followed the road as far as Matt could see. If he hit the wall, he’d die on impact. When he checked the railroad tracks beginning to cut in on the left, he noticed piles of fresh sand and mulch.

  He turned and gave Gambini another hard look, then Moore as the spoiled man-boy mouthed the words fuck you at him. Ignoring the taunt, he glanced up at the chopper, then down at the fire engines. They were closing fast and now riding those deafening horns.

  Time was slipping away quickly and chewing up the distance. One hundred yards became fifty yards, and in an instant, there were only twenty-five left.

  Matt turned and gazed at the piles of sand and mulch around the railroad tracks. He shivered in the cold air, the monsters awake and alive in his head. He needed them to be with him now. He needed them to—

  Matt let out a death scream. Leaping into the black, he thrashed his arms in the wind trying to keep his balance. Trying to spread his wings and fly.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  It was a hard landing—the flight fast and filled with terror—the shock of the fall quaking through his body from head to toe. He’d hit the ground and bounced forward onto a pile of mulch. For several moments, he just lay there on his back, watching and trying to focus on what seemed more like a hallucination than anything real.

  He could see Gambini picking a lane on the right side of the road, sparks flying as the truck careened off the wall of rocks and stone. But when the fire engines passed, the truck never stopped moving and never lost speed. Then the three Lincoln Continentals took their turns working the narrow gap and following Gambini into the night one by one.

  Several moments passed with Matt thinking that he might actually be dead and basking in a light so bright it had to be heaven. Once he noticed that he was in pain, he looked up into the sky and realized that the light was coming from the LAPD’s chopper.

  He couldn’t understand why they had ended their pursuit and come to a standstill hovering above him like a mother ship. He squinted and raised his left hand over his face to shield his eyes. He could feel the rush of air from the rotors, hear the grating sound of the engines, and smell the chopper’s foul exhaust. But even more, as the seconds ticked by, as the taillights from Gambini’s truck and the three Lincolns began to fade into the night and then vanish entirely—he could feel the anger in his bones.

  The outrage.

  He sat up, bending his arms
and knees and making sure he hadn’t broken any bones. Holding his right arm into the light, he examined the gunshot wound and felt a small degree of relief that the bullet had only shaved off a layer of skin.

  He gazed back up at the chopper, wondering if the pilot and crew were idiots. Whether they might be dimwits or blithering fools, masquerading as police officers.

  They were letting Gambini get away.

  They were aiding and abetting a man who had murdered five people outright, injuring and killing even more with his Mercedes the other night.

  Matt heard the sirens and saw the patrol units approaching at high speed, their tires kicking up walls of dust behind them. Then the loudspeaker on the chopper sounded off.

  “Stay where you are, or you will be shot.”

  Matt shook his head and stood up. They really were brain dead.

  “Do not move, or you will be shot. Raise your hands in the air.”

  Matt took a deep breath and exhaled, waiting for the patrol units to arrive. There were five of them, and it suddenly occurred to him that they might be the same units who had chased him through the hills above Hollywood. If that was the case, there was a better than even chance that they could be amped up and dangerous. He watched them skid to a stop, noticing the dents in the side of the lead car. The doors burst open and ten cops with their guns raised started racing toward him.

  They were all young. All jacked up and crazy.

  It had to be them.

  Matt looked at the cop who had been behind the wheel in the lead car, the man who had tried to bulldoze him over the edge of the mountain. He was charging forward with more verve than the others. He had ultrapale skin, a shaved head, and blue eyes that were set a half inch too far apart to be normal.

  He looked stupid and seemed way too angry. They all did.

  They were shouting at him, ordering him to get down on the ground, screaming like they were deranged. When the cop with the shaved head spotted the .45 in Matt’s belt holster, it felt like the man’s engine blew and those eyes of his got big and scary.

  “He’s gotta gun!” the cop shouted. “Gun, gun, gun!”

  Matt raised his hands in the air and knelt down on his knees. He could see his fingers shaking. He looked at the ten cops with their pistols out and ready. He looked at their faces, hoping he would remember them when this was over.

  “I’m a police officer,” he said in a loud voice. “And I’m wounded. I need medical—”

  The cop with the shaved head kicked Matt in the head with his boot and knocked him down to the ground. When he spoke, he was shouting at the top of his lungs.

  “Shut up and keep still, or I swear I’ll shoot you!”

  “I’m a police officer,” Matt said, trying to catch his breath. “And I’m wounded.”

  “I told you to keep your mouth shut. You’re charged with the murder of a city councilwoman and her bodyguard, you sick piece of scum. You ran out on us. You tried to get away from me. Nobody gets away from me. Do you understand that, you dirty piece of crap? Nobody!”

  The cop grit his teeth and gave him another hard kick, this time in the ribs. And then another. Matt let out a groan and covered his head and face with his arms, but there were ten of them. And they were working like a gang—kicking and squealing and swinging their batons at his head. The blows were relentless, the beating out of some nightmare. He could feel the cop with the shaved head taking his pistol away from him. For reasons impossible to guess, the act of confiscating Matt’s gun appeared to make the cop even more angry. The kicks and punches carried extra weight now. Killer weight. One of them, the skinniest of the ten, seemed to be taking great pleasure in stomping on Matt’s gunshot wound with the heel of his boot. He was laughing and whining and squealing the way animals do.

  At a certain point, the world began to darken and turn black. Matt could still hear them kicking him. He could hear their clubs whooshing through the night and landing on his body. He could hear them laughing like they were giddy and so revved up they just couldn’t make themselves stop. He could hear them—but as he began to fade into the gloom, he couldn’t feel them anymore.

  And then something odd happened.

  He heard a loud noise, followed by a definite thud. The kicking stopped after that, along with the pounding from their batons. He tried to open his eyes, but it felt like his lids had been glued shut. After fighting it some, he managed to part his eyelashes slightly and see a faint, narrow image through the slits.

  The cop with the shaved head had collapsed onto the ground. Matt could see a bullet hole in his forehead right between those vicious blue eyes of his. The cop had that thousand-yard stare going now, and his teeth were jutting out.

  Someone rolled Matt over onto his back.

  He wasn’t sure if he screamed or not. He knew that he was afraid because he couldn’t move or fight back. But even worse, his body had gone numb for a while, and that was beginning to slip away now. He could feel a river of pain rushing in to fill the void.

  He looked up through the slits in his eyelids.

  The nine cops who were still alive had formed a line and were trying to catch their breaths and calm down. They were facing the road with their hands in the air. Matt could hear someone shouting at them. He tried to see who it was but couldn’t turn his head. After several moments, a barrel-chested man wearing a police uniform stepped into view holding a Beretta .45 in his right hand. He had three other cops with him, and all three wore leather jackets to go with their grim faces and hard eyes. All three were carrying shotguns.

  Matt looked back at the cop with the .45, noting the shock of white hair and his emerald-green eyes. Despite the man’s age, he looked like a street fighter, and right now, he looked invincible. He looked fierce and tough—a real meat eater ready to gnaw on a fresh kill.

  The man knelt down. Matt could feel him looking at him.

  “Are you okay?” the man said finally.

  Matt tried to speak but couldn’t make his mouth work. As he struggled to say something, he gazed at the cop’s face. After a while, it dawned on him that he knew him. The man with the shock of white hair was his supervisor, Lt. Howard McKensie.

  McKensie shook his head. “I’m sorry, Jones,” he said. “I’m sorry that they did this to you. They’ll never do it to anybody again. You have my word on that. They’ll never get the chance.”

  Matt nodded at him, even though he didn’t believe it and knew that at some point, when these nine freaks thought all was forgiven, he’d have to deal with them himself. He pushed the nightmare aside—his thirst for revenge. Somehow, he managed to whisper without moving his jaw.

  “Robert Gambini.”

  McKensie leaned closer. “What about him?”

  Matt shut his eyes and opened them again, the pain evolving into agony. When he spoke, his voice was barely audible.

  “I almost had him,” he said. “He’s getting away.”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Matt saw the batons swinging through the air and tried to cradle his head in his arms to protect his already banged-up face. But tonight, his arms wouldn’t work or even move, and so he took the beating straight up. The blows kept coming. The laughter from the cops brutalizing him sounded giddy again and more demented than he remembered. Their faces clown-like and deformed.

  He could almost see it. Almost feel it.

  And then his body quaked and shuddered.

  He rolled over in bed and tried to shake off what had become yet another nightmare. Another lost night in a long line of lost nights.

  Flashbacks. Night sweats. Ghouls and ghosts visiting his bed. The Grim Reaper checking on him every hour to see if he was ready, or was the word done. Even last night in the hospital after he found out that Sonny Daniels had lawyered up and was already out on bail, after the doctors had given him enough morphine to knock a horse down—the demonic haunting lingered in the darkness and carried on.

  He gazed up at the ceiling, reliving key moments and remembering the unforge
ttable. He looked at the shadows cast above his head from a tree outside his window dancing in the wind. The different shapes and—

  Someone started pounding on the front door.

  Matt’s eyes rocked across the bed to his cell phone set on the charging base of his clock radio. It was 4:33 a.m., and sunrise was still a long way off. Reaching for the holster slung over the bedpost, he drew his .45.

  After the beating he’d taken yesterday, he’d arrived at a new motto. He wasn’t sure if it was temporary or had the legs to last a lifetime.

  Shoot first and keep on shooting. Deal with what comes next when the bullets run out.

  The heavy pounding on the front door started again, and then Matt’s cell phone lit up. After two rings, he saw McKensie’s name begin blinking on the face and grabbed it.

  “It’s four thirty in the morning, Jones. You’re not gonna make me wait out here in the cold, are you? Now get out of bed and open the goddamn door.”

  “Right.”

  Matt switched off the phone, slid his pistol back into the holster, and grabbed a T-shirt off the chair. As he stepped down the hall and through the kitchen, he began to notice the flashing lights bouncing off the walls. Out the living room window, he could see McKensie waiting by the front door. But parked at the curb were two patrol units with the same three cops McKensie had brought with him last night. They were standing by their cruisers, wearing leather jackets and carrying those shotguns again.

  Matt’s mind started going. Trouble ahead.

  Feeling his body tighten up, he threw the locks and swung the door open. McKensie brushed past him and walked into the living room like he owned the place.

  “Turn on the lights, Jones. It’s dark in here.”

  Matt switched on a table lamp and found McKensie sizing him up with those sharp green eyes of his. His supervisor was standing by the slider, the deck behind him still lit up because Matt kept the outdoor lights on all night.